Telling Stories About the Future of Journalism

Ezra Klein, who started Wonkblog, at the Washington Post, is taking his talents and a few of his colleagues to Vox Media, where, he told David Carr, of the Times, “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.” I wasn’t sure what Klein meant by this, so I went over to Vox’s technology site, The Verge, where he had posted an explanation of the new publication: “Today, we are better than ever at telling people what’s happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what’s happened…. Our mission is to create a site that’s as good at explaining the world as it is at reporting on it.”

This didn’t make things much clearer. What does it mean to explain the world on the Web? One thing Internet journalists are never short of is commentary—many of them, such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias, who will leave Slate to join the new project, have been specializing in it since they were fledgling bloggers. (Klein has also written for The New Yorker.) What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say. Klein says that the new site is going to be in the “informing-our-audience business,” which describes everything from the Times to Fox Sports to blogging (which is what Klein and his colleagues have made their names doing). Perhaps Klein isn’t ready to say clearly; perhaps he doesn’t yet know exactly what he and his colleagues will be doing at Vox. That might help explain why his former employer, the Post, didn’t agree to Klein’s terms for staying at the paper—which, according to reports making the rounds, included at least ten million dollars in funding, a large staff, and complete editorial independence.

Vox, in its own words, is “one of the fastest-growing online publishers, focused on lifestyle brands that connect with passionate audiences. Vox is solving the problem of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling, and brand advertising at scale.” That’s a lot of suspect words for such a short passage, but even after gliding past “brand,” “scale,” and “high-value” I was stopped by “storytelling.” It’s a term I hear a lot these days, often applied to any piece of prose longer than three hundred words, and it’s begun to make me uneasy—such a casual throwaway for such a difficult thing.

As I write, the storytelling featured on Vox includes “Vox Is Our Next,” Klein’s mini-essay about his new project, posted on The Verge. Even Klein’s headline is difficult to understand—it almost seems designed to throw you off the scent, to make you feel a little slow. “Our”? “Next”? (The headline turns out to be a Vox inside joke.)

According to Carr, “Everything at Vox, from the way it covers its subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems on which it produces news, is optimized for the current age.” This, too, is opaque in a way that’s pretty much endemic whenever journalists write about anything having to do with technology, as if they’ve become captive to the assured, technical-sounding, empty language of their beat—as if they need to use its language in order to be taken seriously in that world, and to hell with the old-fashioned, outdated virtue of clarity. Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism’s dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

Carr tells us that this move by the Post’s star young policy explainer—Klein is twenty-nine—is a sign of the rosy outlook for journalism on the Web. Carr’s headline, in the print edition of the still-playing-by-the-old-rules Times, makes it admirably clear: “A Big Hire Signals Web News Is Thriving.” The evidence for this state of health is fourfold: heavy traffic, deep-pocketed investment, new technology, and brand names. Klein is just the latest of a number of well-known writers who have fled such sinking vessels as the Post, the Times, and the Wall Street Journal for the faster, lighter, wing-sail multihulls that skim along the surface of digital media. Their destination has nothing to do with the old, fixed idea of news, according to Henry Blodget, of Business Insider. Blodget, calling from the World Economic Forum, in Davos, told Carr, “Digital journalism is as different from print and TV journalism as print and TV are from each other…. The news-gathering, storytelling and distribution approaches are just very different.” (See what I mean?)

How is digital journalism different? Well, for one thing, Carr says, “Great digital journalists consume and produce content at the same time, constantly publishing what they are reading and hearing. And by leaving mainstream companies, journalists are often able to get their own hands on the button to publish, which is exciting and gratifying.” What this means, I think, is that digital journalists can read and write almost simultaneously, using news aggregators and Twitter feeds and other tools to sample and recycle what others like them write, quickly and efficiently, while figuring out their own thoughts about it, and putting it all up for the world to see, without the slowing interference of editors and fact checkers. The only thing missing from Carr’s précis of digital journalism is reporting. Although Klein did not get into specifics, I take heart from his phrase “as good at explaining the world as it is at reporting on it” and am counting on his new project to fill this gap online.

Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism—money, eyeballs, software, brands. Everything except one thing. “One big obstacle to long term media success remains: quality,” Carr concedes. But once that final hurdle is cleared, once the quality box is checked, the losers will be the “legacy” news organizations, those currently staffed by non-digital journalists, being abandoned by their biggest names, and suffering from such low self-esteem that they tremble at the mention of content-management systems and can already smell their defeat at the hands of Vice Media, ESPN.com, Re/code, Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, Curbed, Eater, Racked, SB Nation, The Verge, and Our Next.

And maybe quality is overrated, anyway. Given their fiscal woes, just ask the Post, the Times, and the Journal.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP.

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